


my picket fence

by babygrxxt



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Divergence, M/M, Post Civil War, and boyfriends, brief mentions of period typical internalised homophobia, new avengers reformed with tony and steve as the leaders, sharon carter and tony stark are cousins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-04 00:07:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20461772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babygrxxt/pseuds/babygrxxt
Summary: In a universe where Tony and Steve came together after the superhero civil war (in more ways than one), the new and improved Avengers face off against a foe known only as Origin — a mutated human with the ability to manifest temporary pocket universes, transporting superheroes back to their point of origin. Tony and Steve are the men with a reckless plan, inevitably leading to a hitch in which they find themselves in each other’s origin stories. With clear instructions to find a power source ASAP, they set about getting back to their own universe, with a little help from their past selves.





	my picket fence

“ Agent 13, Widow, give me a status report on the bridge,” Captain America, also known as the very illustrious Steve Rogers, ordered over the secure Stark communication bug firmly implanted behind his ear.

“What part do you want us to report on?” Agent 13, AKA former SHIELD agent and full time badass Sharon Carter, replied. “The absolutely devastating amount of green ectoplasm on my white suit, or the fact that your boyfriend just tore a hole through our escape plan?”

“I’ll make up for it,” Iron Man, AKA Tony Stark of absolutely infuriating disposition and boyfriend of aforementioned Captain America, promised. Steve didn’t have to see his face to know there was a smirk pulling on his lips — good thing, too, considering the mask made him entirely impassive during a fight and its immediate aftermath. “When this is over, Shar, I’ll make sure to send you a very comprehensive commissary fruit basket.”

“Throw in some of that top shelf champagne and you have yourself a deal, Anthony.”

“As much as I love debating terms and conditions of make up deals,” the Winter Soldier interjected, AKA James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes, Steve Rogers’ utterly exhausted centurion friend, “I would prefer if I got some insight into the green gloop moles taking over uptown San Francisco.”

“What, they didn’t have those in your day?” Falcon jibed. The Falcon was one of Steve’s favourite people, and had been since they met running laps in Washington D.C. a number of years ago, less than you would imagine if you were to witness them finishing each other’s sentences. 

“Guys, focus,” Steve said, though he was loath to stop any conversation that prompted a grin on Bucky’s face, which Sam’s quips always managed. “The moles are courtesy of Harvey Elder. Origin got in his head.”

“And, as we all know personally, paranoia makes people do crazy things,” Tony continued, “like releasing a gloop mole army on the city of San Francisco.”

“Barnes should read the brief,” Natasha Romanoff, of the Black Widow and utterly terrifying variety, concluded. “It might make things easier.”

“Cap, Romanoff said brief on the field.”

“Context matters, Tony,” Steve reminded him, trying extremely hard to ignore the little grunt of frustration over the comms he received in return, because  _ his  _ mask didn’t cover his eyes. He would need to leave a note for that to be remedied posthaste. “Falcon’s surveillance indicates we have the mole problem under control. We need to get to the source of the problem. Origin has been working for five days by now, and that’s five too many.”

“I love it when you get all authoritative,” Tony Stark hummed, adding even more proof to the already overwhelming pile of evidence for the ‘infuriating’ epithet. 

“Christ, Steve,” Barnes muttered. “If we were sweet talking, you could’ve put me up north with Carter and Romanoff.”

“In your dreams, Barnes.”

“Every night, Carter.”

“Falcon, maintain the perimeter. Make sure Origin doesn’t get any further than this city block. If he does, light it up and push him back. Carter, Romanoff, do a final sweep for civilians. We keep this strictly zero collateral damage, or Ross will have all our asses for breakfast.”

“Oh, sexy,” Tony provided.

“Barnes, I need you to apprehend Mole Man. Last Sam saw him he was crying round the block from the pizza place.”

“The one with the shitty pepperoni?”

“The very one. Me and Tony will handle Origin.”

Orders given and confirmed, the team spread out to follow instructions. Steve lowered his hand from the earpiece, looking up only when he heard the familiar clunk of metal hit against the pavement behind him. 

“When we go Scooby gang, it’s always the two of us in a team,” Tony said, allowing the helmet to retract, revealing his face lightly shining with sweat along his nose. He was entirely gloop free, a knack that Steve still hadn’t managed to master himself, though he was relatively void of green himself. He’d spent most of the day dealing with Taskmaster’s assassins instead since the man was so kindly reminded of the many occasions the Avengers had bested him, which clearly counted as his supervillain origin story. “Someone might think you’re playing favourites, Cap.”

“I am,” Steve replied, not missing a beat. “It’s Bucky. He’s been dying to punch Mole Man in the face all summer.”

Tony let out a gasp, placing his hand over the arc reactor that turned over several times in his chest. Even six months in, Steve still got the same reaction. It was really quite spectacular. “I am wounded. You’ve officially bested me. What’s that they say? Make a god bleed and the world will cease to believe in him? My heart’s bleeding, so that counts. Oh, woe is-”

“Are we going to go get this son of a bitch, or are you going to keep reciting Shakespeare?”

“I’m just trying to keep things interesting for you, sweetheart,” Tony said, and Steve reached out for him, hand resting on Tony’s back. There were at least three layers of metal between them, but it was the thought that counted. They were sentimental like that. “Alright, Cap,” Tony resumed, satisfied, “what’s the plan?”

Steve sighed, hand dropping back down to his side as he looked away from Tony towards the horizon. “Get within engaging distance to Origin. Take him out if possible. If not, get hit with his voodoo, fight through it, come back and take him out anyway.”

“I love how you make it sound simple,” Tony commented. Steve gave him a wry smirk.

“Going off how many times you’ve said that today, a guy might think you love every word out of my mouth.”

“Touché,” Tony allowed, “but it might not be as smooth sailing as we want it to be. I know we’ve run the numbers, but the immunity is eighty percent at best.”

“That’s better odds than most of the fights we’ve faced,” Steve said. “We’ve already been over this at length. You don’t need to come if you aren’t comfortable-”

Tony held his hand up, the suit whirring around him as he moved. “Are you going?” he asked, suddenly fierce. 

Steve met his eye — or the armour’s eye, as it was. “Of course,” he said.

“Then I’m hardly going to say  _ no.” _

Didn’t that just sum them up in a couple of sentences? In fact, this entire mission was pretty representative of them as a whole. It had taken over fifty-six hours trying to piece together a plan that would entice Origin enough to get him out into the open, handpicking bad guys that they  _ knew  _ the Avengers could handle with their hands tied behind their backs, guiding the chaos to streets easily evacuated and areas that were due refurbishment by the Stark Relief Foundation regardless. As far as the actual minutiae of the plan, Steve and Tony were the clear choices — they hadn’t gone mad during their origins the first time, and of all the Avengers, they were the two who lived in the past the most. Tony Stark might be a futurist, but Steve was the one who slept next to him every night. He knew how much time Tony spent in that cave, knew that there were horrors there that would never be put into words.

“Go over the plan when we get there,” Tony said. He had an eidetic memory, so Steve knew it was for him, even if Tony was more than aware that his cognitive processes had been elevated by the serum. He did it anyway.

“Find a suitable power source ASAP. Mine will be with Stark Sr, and yours will be-”

“I can build mine,” Tony said finally. He’d had the materials in the cave once, he could do it again. “Worst case, I have a backup battery right here.”

Steve’s eyes narrowed on the arc in Tony’s chest, reimplanted when the marvels of modern medicine turned out to be a little too good to be true. “Don’t joke about that.”

“I know,” Tony replied, that patented Stark grin fading off his face, replaced with something infinitely softer.  _ This  _ was the person Steve was gone for, the expression that pulled at his heart enough that if he had an arc, it would be whirring too.

“Just like I know the plan. We good?”

“Absolutely stellar, Cap. Let’s go kick this guy’s ass. I have a date tonight, you know.”

With that, Tony’s arm went around Steve’s waist, and they were shooting off into the unknown. 

—

Thirteen minutes, fifty three seconds, that’s how long it took for everything to go to shit. Tony Stark knew because Tony Stark counted, just like he counted everything else. The breaths that Clint took when he was lying up in the med bay with bruised lungs refusing to admit he needed Cho to look him over, the amount of times Bruce ran off to meditate in a twenty-four hour period after a Code Green was called, the number of nights he woke up at three and rolled over only to find a note from Steve on the pillow saying he was down in the gym and to join if he wanted. In fights, though, counting wasn’t just a habit — it was a necessary survival instinct, a way to keep track of health bars in real life. 

And boy, they were getting  _ pummelled.  _

It started out easily enough. Steve and Tony had always worked well together on the field. Even a beat after they were at each other’s throats, mere hours after the first time they clapped eyes on each other, it had taken nothing more than a meeting glance for them to automatically move to each other’s rhythm. That extended to other parts of their life eventually, though it took a lot more work, but coming back to it … well, it always felt like coming home. Tony would feel bad about enjoying the sight of his boyfriend putting a fist through killer robots or apprehending space pirates if he didn’t know Steve was having just as much fun watching Tony bring out his new toys to play with. In this case, it was a sonic disruptor, and the nanotechnology he had been working on had more than its fair share of practice as well. 

Origin wasn’t a danger in and of himself. His notoriety came from what he was capable of influencing other  _ people  _ to do. Belatedly, Tony wondered whether it had been a smart decision giving his blessing for Wanda and Vision to disappear on a romantic getaway to his Sicilian mansion, but Steve had been right. The Avengers were important to everyone involved in them, but they weren’t as close to Wanda’s heart as they had always been to Tony’s. They weren’t her  _ life  _ \-- she had something else to care about, something else that mattered. Tony couldn’t deny her that any more than he could make up for taking her family from her in the first place. 

Still, Wanda would’ve come in really goddamn useful right about now. 

“Tony, do you have a clear shot?” 

Steve’s voice came crisp and clear through the comms unit in his helmet, but Tony knew what he was asking just from looking at his back as he moved on the ground, dodging and weaving out from Origin’s flurried attacks. 

“Negative, Cap,” Tony replied. “This guy’s lighting up more than Whiplash. I could always bring out the try and see policy, but-”

“No, we don’t know what’s-”

One of Origin’s blasts - some form of Hammer tech, potentially, or a derivative of AIM’s new state of the line machine guns manufactured into something so ostentatious that Mysterio’s eyes were probably rolling in his head from the other side of the city - cut Steve’s sentence short. He was blasted back, crashing into a bus with enough force that the metal dented, and Tony was on the ground in front of him before he could even suck in a breath. 

The arc overload built up in his chest, the suit responding intuitively to protect the sensitive squishy parts of his ribcage from the force, and just as Origin lifted his hand to fight against Iron Man this time, he was knocked clean out of the sky by a pillar of light and energy. 

“Tony,” Steve said, pushing himself back onto his feet, taking Tony’s offer of a hand even though Steve Rogers never needed help with anything. It still meant something that he  _ took  _ it, after all. “You-”

“He’s not down,” Tony interrupted, because he knew he would just get a lecture about breaking rank the first time Steve got a scratch and he was  _ sick  _ of trying to prove to him that he was worth being an exception. He glanced a few feet up in the air where two glittering circles, like the sling rings Strange pulled out or the ghost of a sparkler when you spelled your name with them on Halloween, reminded them that the battle was far from over. “We can’t keep fighting with one hand tied behind our back.”

Steve looked at him for a long beat, then gave a single, decisive nod. “We take the power into our own hands, yeah?” As he spoke, Steve reached his hand out to Tony, and Tony clasped it in his own. 

“We’re not going to die because of some C-list supervillain, Rogers,” Tony said, and Steve huffed a laugh, looking down for only a beat at his scuffed combat boots.

“Yeah, I know. Time to rip the Band Aid off.”

Tony wanted to ask if he was sure he could do this, but this was  _ Steve.  _ This was the man who stood up to entire armies without flinching, who joined the battle against the Chitauri a few weeks after everything that he had ever known went into the ocean. This was the man who fought so desperately for what he believed to be right that he would take a stand against one of the people who meant the most to him. Even if that person was Tony, he could respect it. 

But they weren’t on opposite sides now. They would never be on opposite sides again. They were stronger like this, working together, pushing the universe into a better tomorrow.

“I’ll give you a lift,” Tony said, arm going around Steve’s waist. He shot up the second they were secure, hovering above the portals to another world, one far more familiar than the chaos that surrounded them now, even if this had become their nine to five. 

“See you on the other side, Iron Man,” Steve said and with that, he was gone -- disappearing into Origin’s portal universe without a beat of hesitation. 

“Boy do I love you,” Tony muttered in response, because grand confessions always came easier when the other person couldn’t hear them, and then he followed suit. 

—

Steve landed face first on a leather sofa. The air was thick with smoke and dry ice, catching in the back of his throat enough that it would’ve had him spluttering when he was growing up, Bucky worriedly rubbing circles between his shoulder blades. As it was, he could continue to breathe just fine as he pressed his fists into the cushions, feeling the tinge of pain in his tightened muscles from the fight before. 

When he pushed himself up, Steve was face to face - or eyes to intensely dilated pupils - with a man who appeared to have been doused in glitter. No, not glitter -- it was strips of gold ribbon, probably from a party popper, sticking to his skin thanks to the smear of liquor over his cheek. Behind him, a woman with hair even more impressive than Misty Knight’s appeared with a giggle that left all Misty comparisons in the dust. 

“Woah, man,” the guy said, blinking a few times slowly. “That is a seriously awesome costume, dude.”

“I think he looks sexy,” the woman provided. “I wanna break in the new year with  _ Captain America. _ ”

Steve could feel the tips of his ears burning, but he kept his face straight, sitting up properly on the sofa. They weren’t the only three here, he could tell that much. They were in some kind of private inlet, separated from the rest of the proceedings by a curtain pulled just in front of the couch. There was a bottle of champagne pouring out over the floor, clearly dislodged by his descent. They didn’t seem to register that, though, courtesy of the white powder smeared over the woman’s chest. Her nametag said Brittany. His said Bryan. Both  _ doctors,  _ which … okay, Steve knew better than to assume anyone with a PhD would be straight enough to avoid what they were partaking in.

_ Bern 2000.  _ This was New Year’s Eve, 1999. Steve missed the entirety of this decade. Hell, at this stage, the glacier was probably getting its proper hold on him, dragging him deeper into the ocean, knowing that he had another decade before he would be found by a Stark trawler.  _ His  _ origin story didn’t have any kind of place in this environment, which meant …

He was in  _ Tony’s.  _

Although he hadn’t been expecting this, in the split second that it took him to recognise where he was, he also ran through several more  _ likely  _ spots to be dropped, if he was going on an Iron Man centered voyage. The cave, certainly. Maybe the workshop, when Tony first started work on the Mark II. Hell, even appearing in the middle of the street in the immediate aftermath of the Chitauri battle would be more believable than whatever was going on here. 

Tony didn’t talk much about the nineties, other than to say they started off shitty and continued in the same vein. His parents died eight years ago, and during his period of Stark centric curiosity (that hadn’t lessened over the years, but at least didn’t require so much midnight Googling to satiate) Steve had got the general picture of partying, drugs and booze that Tony had partaken in to deal with all that. But still, despite the fact that he tried, quite desperately, to block the entirety of this decade out … this was where he began. 

“Hey, uh …” Steve started. Brittany and Bryan piped up, immediately interested in whatever was about to come out of his mouth. Steve wished he knew himself. Finally, he gestured down to his own suit. “You want to swap?”

Brittany nodded frantically, even when Steve was only halfway through the question, but Bryan just kept looking at him as if he wasn’t quite sure whether the man standing in front of him had two heads or not. “You mean …”

“Clothes. A buddy of mine dared me to bring this, and then he stole my clothes, so.”

“Huh,” Bryan said. “He dared you to dress like Captain America at a technical conference?”

“Oh,” Brittany chimed in. “I bet he’s from MIT.”

“Hole in one,” Steve said, wishing that the ground would open up and swallow him whole.

“Whose year? Anyone I would be familiar with?”

“Uh,” Steve said, wishing for what wasn’t the first time that his brain could come up with any name other than the one it was thinking about. “James Rhodes.”

Brittany and Bryan let out a soft and impressed ‘ah’ at the same time, so Steve was pretty confident his response was appropriate. 

“So,” he said, clearing his throat, “do we have a deal?”

Bryan held his hand out towards him. “We have a deal.”

—

Tony Stark wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Okay, that was a bad joke. It wasn’t even applicable, really, considering the fact that he had been displaced out of San Francisco, of all places. He was a born and bred New Yorker. Malibu was his home. How he had been talked into going to Earthquake Central was really beyond him -- and all those  _ hills?  _ They were enough to drive someone up the wall even if they didn’t have a heart condition and some serious issues keeping up with their supersoldier boyfriend and demigod teammate. 

He wasn’t in Kansas or San Francisco, but the second Tony recovered from the fact he had landed in an alleyway, his face dragging rather cruelly down the side of a brick wall on his way down, he realised exactly what had happened. Brooklyn, 1943. Tony wasn’t sure of the date, but if the fresh posters smeared onto the walls were anything to go by, he was willing to bet that the Stark Expo, courtesy of dear old dad, hadn’t happened yet. 

That meant  _ Steve Rogers  _ hadn’t happened yet either -- or Erskine, more specifically. Tony had an awful habit of correlating everything back to Steve, but it was one of the few character flaws he didn’t have any intention of working on. 

So, he had time. This had really worked out perfectly, even if not exactly as they had envisioned it. They could maintain an emotional distance - or at least, as distant as they had ever managed to be when one thing concerned the other person, which was to say not at all - and they could get the job done lickety split, as they’d say in Steve’s day. Or this day, as it was. 

Tony touched his hand to the side of his face, wincing at the pain that spread uniformly over his cheek. It grounded him, though, the same way as pinpricks of static electricity or sharp shocks had managed to bring him back to the moment since the cave, and he ran through his game plan.

Get some new clothes. Find out what day it was. Figure out a way to get food, someplace to stay low until the Expo came around. Find dear old Dad. Convince him to let Tony in to see his super fun engine prototypes, knowing that one of them would have enough juice to power up the pocket universe transporter Tony had implanted in his wrist before they came into this fight. If that fails, kill Howard Stark and take his engine anyway.

Well, he wouldn’t  _ kill  _ him. That was still his father, even if Tony knew logically all of this was nothing more than an illusion. A little bit of bodily harm, though, wouldn’t go amiss. 

He wouldn’t even need to  _ see  _ Steve until he was back and  _ his  _ Steve was standing in front of him, tired and ready to order a takeaway and run a hot bath. Foolproof, really. 

And because he thought that, predictably, everything went to shit. 

“Hey!”

A coarse voice bounced off the brick walls of the alleyway, and Tony let out a low breath as he turned to see where it was coming from. Three guys - pretty  _ big  _ guys, though compared to Tony most people were - stood just where the sunlight stopped breaching the gap between the buildings, settled into a formation that Tony guessed was intended to intimidate him. It might’ve worked, if he wasn’t Tony Stark, if he wasn’t Iron Man, if he wasn’t perfectly capable of holding his own against an entire terrorist cell when push came to shove. 

“Hey,” Tony replied, holding up a hand in an aborted wave. “This alleyway yours? I was just leaving, actually. Had to take a whiz, you know how it is. Once you get the urge, you just can’t-”

Tony was prevented from walking past them by a hand on his shoulder, and he resisted the overwhelming urge just to break the guy’s wrist right now. It would be so easy to form the suit over his hand, but he needed to preserve the arc’s energy if push came to shove and he needed a backup plan. 

“Hold on,” one of the guys said. “What’s that on your wrist, huh?”

Tony shook his hand out, making sure his sleeve was over his watch. “A bruise. I’m into rough sex, what can I say?”

One of the guys behind huffed a laugh, stopping short when the other two glared at him. Okay, clearly Tony wasn’t going to  _ charm  _ his way out of this situation. 

“I think it’s a fancy wristwatch,” Tweedle Dum continued, “and I think you’re going to give it to us.”

“I think you’re right,” Tony said, sniffing as he said it, “but only on the first point. See, this used to be my old man’s, and he would be really pissed if I lost it to a couple of assholes like you.”

Bucky Barnes was rolling his eyes in the main universe. Tony could  _ feel  _ it, especially if his previous reactions to Steve’s old war stories were anything to go off but damn, something about being jumped in the street just got under Tony’s skin. Didn’t he have as much right to walk as anyone else did? Maybe that was the rich guy entitlement talking, but either way, he had more important things to be dealing with than this shit. 

“Now, if you excuse me-”

“Hey!” 

Tony felt his lungs collapse out through his asshole, because that  _ voice  _ …

Everyone turned to find the owner, but Tony’s eyes had already settled on him long before anyone else. Spindly legs, the tiniest torso he had ever seen in real life, ribs harsh and heaving under the thin fabric of his shirt, a golden halo of hair, that nose that seemed all the more impressive with his original proportions, and finally, those cold steel blue eyes that were, at that moment in time, filled with a simmering anger. 

Steve motherfucking Rogers, in the pre-serum, as his mother made him, flesh. 

“Three against one’s hardly fair,” Steve pointed out, but that was all he managed before the guys looked between themselves, huffed a laugh like they were in on a joke, and immediately made their way towards him. 

Tony saw it playing out right in front of him -- Steve’s origin story cut short because he decided to pick a fight on his future boyfriend’s behalf. No, on a  _ stranger’s  _ behalf, without even knowing what he was being targeted for. All Steve had seen was a fight that he perceived as unfair, and he was wading right into it, and yeah, it made sense why Tony found himself here. 

Steve threw the first punch, and from the crack that bounced back Tony could tell that it was a semi decent one, but he received compensation for his trouble. He was shoved back into the trash cans, Tweedle Dum turning to the two stooges with a smirk pulling at his lips. “I’ll deal with this punk,” he said. “Two of you get that watch.”

Tony Stark was a  _ fixer.  _ It was one of his best qualities, but it was also one of his worst. Trusting other people was where he fell short. After all, why would he let them battle their own demons if he could come up with a solution that saved them the pain and solved their problems within half the time? It was something that he had worked on, though, since Steve returned after Siberia. Now, Tony knew that he could  _ trust  _ his partner to do what was necessary, which meant that he was more than confident Steve would handle Tweedle Dum while he took out the sidekicks.

“Hi boys,” Tony said, giving them another wave. They charged for him at once, and Tony ducked under their blows, meaning they ran forward and had to compensate once they realised they’d overshot. While they recovered, Tony moved behind the first, delivering a quick jab to the point on his back that Natasha was always particularly fond of. He fell twitching to the ground, his eyes rolling back in his head. 

The other man blinked a few times, but it didn’t deter him. Tony wondered whether it was the war waging on the front that had them abandoning their brain cells, though he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Oh my God,” Tony said, looking over the guy’s shoulder with wide eyes and a suitably awestruck expression. He fell for it, and Tony grabbed the lid off one of the trash cans behind him, whacking him firmly around the back of the head. 

He turned, then, to see how Steve was getting on, and found Tweedle Dum groaning in the dust, clutching his jewels. Tony raised an eyebrow, a surprised laugh escaping his lips, and Steve shrugged.

“I can do this all day,” he said, tucking his shirt into his slacks, wiping the blood from his nose on the back of his hand. 

“I don’t doubt it,” Tony replied, stepping forward to hold out his hand to Steve. “Thanks for the assist.”

“No problem,” Steve said, eyes going to the wristwatch visible with the sleeve of his shirt creased. He took his hand. “That what they were after?”

Tony nodded. “I thought it might’ve been my sparkling personality, at first,” he joked, “but then it turned out they, like everyone else, just want me for my choice in accessories.”

A small frown appeared on Steve’s face, and Tony briefly wondered what word he had stumbled on to make it clear that he wasn’t from this century -- and then he realised what he was wearing. Joggers and a t-shirt were perfectly nondescript in the twenty-first century, but bring them here and they suddenly became  _ something.  _

“I’m Tony,” he said in an attempt to distract, not that it had ever worked on Steve before. “Tony, uh … Potts.” God, Pepper would actually murder him. She would hate everything about this. He should send her a fruit basket, even if he was never planning on telling her what went down with Origin beyond the basic details. 

“Steve Rogers,” Steve replied. His frown grew deeper, and Tony was convinced he had it made. “They do that to your face?”

Steve Rogers, continually surprising. Tony reached to touch the offending face, stopping about an inch short when he recognised how much that would hurt the second time around. “Yeah,” Tony lied. It didn’t sit particularly comfortably, but what about this was normal? “I had them on the ropes, though.”

Steve smiled at him, then, a lopsided smirk that always had Tony’s insides turning in on themselves. It seemed like even more of an accomplishment from this Steve, somehow, this Steve that knew only a world of pain and hacking lungs and being denied the opportunity to fight for what he believed in. “I’ve got a first aid kit back home. My ma was a nurse, it kinda sticks in the blood.”

“You’re not afraid I’m a serial killer?” Tony offered. 

“Pretty sure a serial killer wouldn’t tell me his name.”

“He would if he wanted to make you his next victim.”

“Well, good luck beating out the fever. He’ll be coming to collect long before you decide to shank me.”

Oh, Tony  _ liked  _ him. He wasn’t sure why that was a shocking revelation, considering this  _ was  _ the man he loved, albeit seventy years before they’d even met, but it was. “Alright,” Tony conceded. “You can play nurse. I’m giving you my hearty consent.”

Steve turned away from him, then, leading him out onto the street, but Tony caught sight of his eyes rolling before he did. They walked in companionable silence for a few beats until Steve broke it once again. He talked more, now, than he ever did in the future. It was a welcome change. 

“Besides,” he muttered, “if you kill me, my roommate’ll come home and kill  _ you.  _ He’s the real loyal type. Sergeant in the army and everything.”

Barnes. Tony grinned at him. “Promises promises,” he replied.

—

What Steve wouldn’t give at this point in time to just melt into the wall. He made bargains, deals with himself that he hoped the universe wouldn’t take literally. He would never drink coffee again, at least not before six in the morning. He would stop texting Sam to go for a jog, exposing his best friend to all kinds of humiliation when he lapped him ten ways to Sunday. He would pretend not to remember the time Bucky, with a smirk on his face that quickly faded, shot at the shield and the bullet rebounded back into his own leg during a particularly competitive training session, and he definitely wouldn’t bring it up anytime Bucky got a bit too big for his boots. 

Parties had never really been Steve’s thing. Growing up, they weren’t  _ anybody’s  _ thing. Prohibition mindsets had settled into the grain of their parents’ society, meaning that kids grew up sneaking sips of moonshine on the fire escape and hiding them under floorboards when they heard the stairs creaking. It was more cloak and dagger, less ostentatious displays of wealth and disinhibition.

During the war had been a different story. On the rare occasion they got out for some R-and-R, the Howlies had made it their personal mission to get as trashed as humanly possible while Steve and Bucky watched with bemused interest (Bucky had always been able to hold his liquor, but Steve should’ve recognised the lack of even mild tipsiness long before his best friend fell from the train). The twenty-first century had been an adjustment, for sure, but Steve had known exactly what Tony was aiming for when he saw the other man tip back a fluorescent blue drink with the same single-minded focus he demonstrated in his missions as Iron Man. 

Steve might not  _ like  _ Tony at parties - often his presence there was solely to play a part or act as a distraction from something else going on in his vast mind - but he had to admit the other man was  _ good  _ at them. It wasn’t only Steve’s burgeoning feelings, at the time unnamed and desperately denied, that had him standing beside Tony at every Avengers gathering from 2012 onwards. 

He didn’t have Tony now. He had a mission, instead — which ironically enough involved  _ finding  _ the Tony that would one day become the Tony he knew. Steve smoothed out the suit he was wearing, glancing across the crowd. It was less technical conference the closer the clock got to midnight. 

The serum had its uses, and eidetic memory was one of them. Tony mentioned New Year’s Eve, 1999. They’d been in bed, and Steve had been flicking through news on his tablet, and Tony had looked up from the file he was reading through and said, ‘You know, I met Yinsen before.’

Mentions of Yinsen were few and far between, and rarely did the man’s actual name escape Tony’s lips, so Steve had listened. He knew he had maybe two hours at most before Tony would be in an elevator with Maya Hansen, mere moments after he had brushed off Aldrich Killian, and then there would be no hope of pulling Tony down to get him to assist with anything because he would be blackout drunk. Not that he couldn’t work drunk, of course — Iron Man was capable of a great many things, though self preservation wasn’t one of them. 

This might not be a  _ standard  _ mission, but it was approached with the same tactician’s response as the others. Steve started to scan the most likely location for the target, that being beside the bar, next to the DJ asking if they had AC/DC, close to the exit so he could run to the bathroom without being spotted. It took all of ten minutes searching before Steve’s eyes finally landed on a familiar back, and as he followed the younger Tony’s eyeline, he saw Maya Hansen at the other end of the bar, finger running along the rim of her empty glass. 

An invitation, that was how it started. Steve felt a stirring in his gut, but he ignored it in favour of moving through the crowd. It wasn’t like he was under any illusion he was Tony’s first, and at this point they’d never even  _ met.  _ He had a job to do, and if Steve Rogers was good at anything, it was compartmentalisation. Emotions didn’t do well in the field.

He intercepted just as Tony finished off the last of his glass, stepping in front of him to block his view of Maya. Tony blinked a few times, then looked up to meet Steve’s eyes. It took all of two seconds for Steve to read the expression on his face, and the smirk to pull on his lips.

Christ, Tony really hadn’t changed. Not physically, at least, though Steve knew it would be a different situation if he saw the man’s chest, or glanced down at his hands. There would be no mottled scars, no arc reactor tucked securely into his rib cage, no calluses or burn marks from the repulsors digging into his palms. This Tony had a few less wrinkles, no grey streaking through his hair on the side, and his jacket was tailored tighter to suit the kind of body that came from a thirty year old man who frequently hauled heavy machinery, but it was still Tony. Steve still knew every inch. 

Suddenly, it became harder to compartmentalise. A few years ago, Steve might not have known exactly what was going through Tony’s mind as the other man’s eyes dropped before meeting his gaze, or at least he could  _ pretend  _ not to know. Now, he’d heard it described in a thousand different ways, all of which made the back of his neck heat up uncomfortably, so he knew  _ exactly  _ what Tony was picturing.

“Well, hello,” Tony said, setting his glass down on the bar. The bartender, obviously well instructed, stepped up immediately to refill it. “And who are we?”

“Stevens,” Steve replied. “Roger Stevens.”

Tony raised an eyebrow, that gaze dropping once again. Steve felt a lump form in his throat. How did Natasha  _ do  _ this? “Roger Stevens,” Tony repeated. “Turn that around, and what do you get?”

Sharon seemed to think that giving Steve a name as close to his own as possible would make espionage more comfortable, and the grand majority of the time her assumption proved true. Of course, that theory wasn’t really stress tested when it came to the smartest guy in the world. 

Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Who sent you?”

Steve paused, ticking over the options in his head.

“Rhodes,” he said, finally.

_ That  _ seemed to break through the untouchable facade, just a little. Tony faltered, but he caught himself just as quick. Steve was almost disappointed, but this was Tony as he had first met him — defensive to the bitter end, though you couldn’t tell by how damn cavalier he was. 

“Rhodes,” Tony repeated. He went quiet for a moment, then reached for his refilled drink, tipping it back in three long gulps. “Guess he’s making up for Halloween. Alright, let’s go.”

“What?” 

“I don’t think Rhodes would’ve splashed out for the flirting package. Air Force salary, you know. Am I right or am I right?”

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. When Steve got back, he was going to punch Origin so hard they’d find his nasal bone in his armpit. “You’re right,” Steve replied. “I hear you’ve got a habit for that.”

And then, maybe the strangest thing happened all night — Tony  _ grinned  _ at him, bright and wonderful and unguarded, and Steve felt as if his heart was going to launch itself out of his chest. Luckily, it only lasted for a beat before Tony turned on his heels, striking through the crowd as if he expected Steve to follow him.

Of course, Steve - or Roger Stevens -  _ was  _ getting paid to do exactly that. Steve’s poor ma would be rolling in her grave. Bucky would die all over again to hear about this. What was Steve going to write in the report? He managed to make alien invasions and robot overlords seem bland on a page when Fury was asking for the details, but this? This was another level.

First rule of espionage though — go with the flow. Carol’s friend taught him that, Jessica Drew, another group that would be revelling in his misfortune. 

They climbed three flights of stairs in silence. Steve knew better than to offer the elevator, though he was curious as to why  _ this  _ Tony was so determined to trudge his way up. It could be an attempt to burn through the alcohol so he could get his high faster. That seemed standard. 

Finally, though, Steve met Tony’s eye again just as the other man’s hand closed around the door handle of his room. “Fair warning,” Tony said to him, still with that same casual air that had overlaid everything he said in the Helicarrier, up until the point Coulson was killed, “you remind me of a few people in my life.”

“A few?” Steve repeated. “Here was me thinking I was unique.”

Tony huffed a laugh at that, genuine once again. “Yeah, well, no one is when it comes down to it. Not with things like this, at least.”

With that, the door opened and Tony strolled in, lifting a hand to signal for Steve to shut the door behind him. The fact that was necessary pulled at him a little, but he wasn’t here to lament over what Tony had been through. He wasn’t even here for what  _ Tony  _ thought he was here for.

“Are you a wine man, spirits, or tee-total on the job?” Tony asked. “Because I-”

“Who do I remind you of?”

Tony, now holding a bottle of champagne in one hand and two flutes in the other, paused. “My ex,” he said, slowly. “Boarding school, then college. Tiberius-”

“Who else?” Steve pressed.

“Come on,” Tony huffed. “Roger Stevens? You know exactly who you’re going for.”

“What if I said I was him?”

This time, the champagne bottle slid right back into its bucket of ice. “I’d say you’re getting a bit above your pay station,” Tony replied, seemingly unperturbed, at least if you were going solely by the tone of his voice, which Steve never did. “Steve Rogers died in ‘45. You’re about fifty five years too late for a grand return, sorry to say.”

“Actually, I’m twelve years too early,” Steve continued. The bullet was out of the chamber now, and Steve wasn’t a coward. San Francisco was burning around them, and he had a job to do. He had  _ his  _ Tony to get back to, who was probably doing absolutely horrifically in the forties. He’d pull it together, though. He was good at going with the flow. “Suspended cryogenic animation. The serum meant I couldn’t die, even when I tried to.”

The flutes were placed down on the table in the room, and Tony took a step back, hands going to rest behind him as he leaned. Steve knew him, though. A casual gesture to hide the fact that Tony was bracing for impact, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the wood. 

“This isn’t exactly how I thought I was getting fucked tonight,” Tony admitted. Steve almost huffed a laugh, but the situation didn’t call for him to be as glib as Tony probably wanted him to be. “So what are you telling me? Time travel, is that it? You’re from the future?”

_ No. You’re in a pocket universe. All of this is a construct. You’re not real. You’re only a memory.  _ Steve was many things, but he wasn’t cruel. “Yeah,” he said, finally. “I’m from the future.”

“Right,” Tony said, as if Steve had just refused that drink he offered. “What the hell do you want with me?”

Steve reached for his back pocket, taking care to keep his movements slow, and pulled out the universe transporter. “I need a power source to get me home,” he said. 

Something glinted in Tony’s eyes, then, a sobriety that shone through even the hazy glass of drunkenness. Tony stepped forward, gaze entirely focused on the transporter nestled into Steve’s palm — the ‘A’ insignia in the centre, the curve of red and gold that adorned the outside casing, how the circuitry weaved and knitted together, visible when Steve turned it on the flip side. 

“Who built this?” Tony asked.

Steve smiled, a wave of pride rushing through him _ .  _ “You did.”

Tony took a step back, pinching his nose between his forefinger and thumb. “Okay,” he said, more slowly this time. “So we’re … together? Like, friends?”

“Teammates. Earth’s greatest heroes, in fact.”

“And together,” Tony repeated. Steve felt the tips of his ears burning as Tony moved towards him again, stopping only when they were toe to toe. “We’re together.”

“Yeah,” Steve said, because lying to Tony wasn’t something he wanted to repeat, ever, even another  _ version  _ of Tony. “We’re together.”

A muscle clenched in Tony’s jaw. Steve wasn’t sure whether he was going to kiss him or deck him, was trying to weigh up how to respond to either, when Tony cut off his line of thought with a clear directive. “Prove it.”

A million and one facts and details came rushing into Steve’s mind. Where Tony liked to eat, how he took his coffee, the movies he could recite off the top of his head, the theorems he had been working on since college. How he incorporated the plans for the reactor into the complicated tile pattern in the foyer of Avengers Tower just in case they needed a contingency, how he planned for tomorrow and yesterday all in the same breath. His codes for the lab, his overrides, every suit he had ever built, the ones that Steve had provided some design support for. 

All of these things seemed so tied into who Tony was  _ now,  _ the person he had become in the past seven years since forming the Avengers. That meant he needed to go back  _ further,  _ even if it stung.

“You built a house on Malibu Point even though every architect from here to Baghdad suggested against it, said it was impossible,” Steve said. “In that house, you have a basement workshop, and your access code is  _ Captain America,  _ albeit with the letters scrambled. You also have a classic 1932 Ford. It’s the last car you worked on with your father, and you haven’t finished the refurbishments even where I come from, because that means letting go of something you never thought you’d lose. You’re good at walking away, Tony, but you’ve never been good at letting go.”

It was no wonder Tony was looking at him like that, because Steve’s lungs were so tight that he felt as if he had sucked all the air from the hotel room. 

Tony reached around until his hand found the chaise lounge at the end of his bed, and he sunk into the cushion, head going into his hands. Steve wanted to join him, but he settled for perching on the side of the bed instead, a safe distance away but still close enough to put a hand on his back if he needed it. 

It felt like the New Year should’ve passed them by already in the time it took for Tony to speak again, and when he did, it was short, to the point, and so Tony that Steve felt like crying with it.

“Holy shit, Cap.”

—

“Ma would say you just need to shove a potato on it and stop whining.”

“I’m not whining. I’m pouting, there’s a difference.”

“Is it the shape of your mouth?”

“Oh, ha ha. As if you can talk about anything mouth related. That tooth looks like it’s hanging on by a thread.”

“Eh, I can just push it back in. The gum heals up around it.”

“That isn’t even close to what  _ actually  _ happens, and you know it.”

Steve’s final wipe at Tony’s cheek stings more than the rest have put together, so Tony knows he’s doing it to prove a point. Steve’s always been capable of gentleness when he puts his mind to it, so much so that Tony is fit to bursting with it every time he thinks about the self control necessary for a powerhouse to become an instrument of healing instead of war. Tony thought skinny Steve would be different, but he wasn’t — he still had that same fire, that same brimming determination ready to boil over. 

Tony supposed this would answer the question Steve had never asked him, but was sure to think about at some stage — it definitely wasn’t the serum that turned Steve into the man Tony loved. Origin might not be onto a killer supervillain shtick, but he’d served some kind of purpose after all. 

“I’m amazed a worrier like you had the nerve to wear something like that on your wrist,” Steve commented, dropping the cloth into the bowl of water he had perched between them. It went cold long ago, but it had damn near knocked Steve out just lugging it up the stairs the first time around, and Tony couldn’t persuade him to take a hand if it killed him. 

“Yeah, well, I like being contrary,” Tony retorted. “Besides, I’m not a worrier.”

“You honestly think that,” Steve asked, “or do you just want to hear me argue against it?”

Tony huffed a laugh, wincing as his cheek pulled. “I always want to hear you argue.”

He could feel Steve’s eyes on the side of his face, and Tony knew exactly how close that had come to the wire. Consciously, he avoided the other man’s pervasive gaze, taking in the room around him instead. It was exactly the kind of place he had pictured Steve staying in before the war, though even Tony’s extensive imagination couldn’t quite prepare him for the physicality of it. 

Two pairs of boots sat at the front door, yesterday’s newspaper tucked between them, scrunched up pages leading their way to the sofa. The window was barely a window at all, just glass gingerly placed into the frame, and the radiator clunked far more often than it actually produced  _ heat.  _ There was a half empty bottle of moonshine on the kitchen table -  _ Bucky’s,  _ Steve had supplied,  _ so don’t you dare touch it  _ \- and a mattress in the middle of the floor, draped with a blanket so frayed at the edges that it was perfectly evident mice had been gnawing on it.

All Tony wanted to do was take the watch off his wrist and tell Steve to go make his fortune bartering it on the black market. Selling Stark tech from the twenty-first century for even a quarter of what it was worth would no doubt set him and Bucky up for life, but then again, even the rich didn’t manage to escape the clutches of this war. Besides, this wasn’t Steve. It was an offshoot universe based on a memory, nothing more, nothing less. 

It was hard to remember that when Tony looked back over at him again, wincing as Steve coughed in that chest wrenching way, hands braced forward on the kitchen table to stop himself from keeling over. 

Tony wanted to comment on the cough, but if his experience with Steve and injuries on the battlefield was anything to go by, it wouldn’t go down well. 

“The Stark expo is coming round soon, right?” 

Steve’s hand went to his chest, just for a beat, the line between his eyebrows deepening until he caught himself. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s tonight. Buck’s got us tickets.”

“Think you could bring a tag along?” Tony asked. It didn’t particularly matter whether Steve said yes or no. Tony would be there regardless, he didn’t have a choice. But it would be nice to have Steve choose  _ him  _ — that was never something he tired of.

“Buck’s probably already got us dates,” Steve replied.

“I never said anything about it being a date.”

The response was out before he could think about it, or maybe a small part of Tony just wanted to see how he would react. He was good at that — getting reactions, figuring out what made people tick. 

Steve turned to him, now with a renewed reasoning for that frown on his face. “You should be careful saying things like that,” he said lowly. 

“Why?” Tony asked, even though he knew the answer. “Isn’t the right to free speech one of the tenets of our fair country?”

“What you’re doing is different. People might have a problem with it.”

“Clearly  _ you  _ have a problem with it.”

A muscle in Steve’s jaw clenched. “I don’t.”

“Yeah?” Tony said, pushing himself up from where he had been leaning against the windowsill. 

It wasn’t as if this was the first time they’d had a conversation like this. If anything, the first time had been more heated. It had been only a few months after the Incident, and Pride came to New York City. Steve was surprisingly progressive considering his forties upbringing, but then again, it wasn’t that surprising at all if you knew him. It was just when Tony turned his flirting towards  _ Steve  _ that things started going south. 

Now, Tony understood exactly why that was. Internalised homophobia was a bitch, and it was one battle that had grated at Steve for over ninety years, and now here Tony was, pushing the boat out seventy years too early. He should stop — but he didn’t. 

Steve took a step forward at the same time as Tony did, and before long they were only a few inches apart, Steve’s eyes almost level with Tony’s. God, that was novel. 

“Who the hell are you?” Steve asked, and Tony was reminded once again that no matter how well he might know Steve Rogers, the other man was entirely capable of surprising him. 

“I told you,” Tony said. “I’m Tony Potts.”

“Yeah?” Steve said, and oh boy, Tony had been entirely correct in his assumptions when he said Steve Rogers had  _ always  _ been Captain America whether he had the serum or not. “Then what’s that on your chest?”

The hard look in his eyes showed Tony that he wasn’t playing around. Shooting back with a joke wasn’t going to cut it, not when, to the untrained and seventy years prior eye, it probably looked like he was strapped with a bomb in the middle of a country that had just entered the war. 

In a rather predictable twist of fate, Tony swallowed thickly and said, “I can explain.” 

Steve levelled the same look at him as he had a hundred and one times before, albeit with a thicker jaw and an enhanced level of world weariness. “Start explaining,” he commanded and yeah, it wasn’t the serum that gave him that authority in his voice. Tony tried to ignore the swooping it caused in his gut. He was a taken man, now. Taken by the man standing in front of him, in fact. God, this was confusing. 

“My name is Tony,” he started off, which seemed a pretty apt prologue, “but my surname is Stark, not Potts.”

“Stark,” Steve repeated, raising an eyebrow. “Like Howard Stark?”

“The very one. That’s dear old Dad, actually.”

Steve’s gaze dropped from Tony’s eyes, down his body and then back up again. 

“Hey,” Tony said, holding up a hand. “I’m younger than I look.”

“Howard Stark is in his twenties,” Steve replied. “I know he’s …”

“Prolific?”

“But you are-” Steve gestured vaguely towards Tony’s head, and he  _ knew  _ he had focused on the grey appearing just at his temples, gradually beginning to snake its way to the back of his head.

“Well that’s just offensive,” Tony said, actually feeling somewhat offended. “You love the grey.”

Steve blinked once, and then Tony realised the second bomb hadn’t yet gone off. 

“My age, and this nifty invention in my chest, can be explained very easily,” Tony said. “I’m a time traveller. From the future, obviously.”

“You’re insane.”

“Probably, but that doesn’t mean I’m lying.” 

Steve had always been good at reading people. Tony put his faith in inventions, patterns of human behaviour, machinery that could be counted on because he was the one implanting the code. Steve, though, he took a lot more on faith. He could tell whether someone was bullshitting him from a mile away, even Tony, who had pretty successfully convinced the world that he was nothing other than a drunken playboy who enjoyed rattling around in a workshop, and who had  _ definitely  _ excelled in appearing heartless. 

Tony had never been entirely sure how he did it, but looking at this Steve who didn’t have more than a decade’s experience of employing that particular skill in high pressure situations gave him something of an insight. It was the eyes -- the windows to the soul. Steve was looking straight at him now, unflinching. Of course, he had always been like that, even on the Helicarrier. The first time they met, moments after Loki was blasted on his ass, Tony knew that Steve - or Captain America, as he was then - was trying to search for his eyes through the impenetrable metal of the Iron Man mask. 

The realisation slowly dawned on Steve that maybe the madman in his apartment wasn’t actually  _ that  _ mad, but he wasn’t going straight for blind faith. Contrary to popular belief, stepping over the edge of a cliff wasn’t actually Steve Rogers’ go to, though it had proven effective in the past.

“And you knew me?” Steve said, finally.

“Extremely well,” Tony replied. 

“Prove it.”

Lucky for both of them, Tony had planned for just this occasion the first time he heard the words ‘time travel’ bandied about. 

“You were born July 4th, 1918. Good old Independence Day turned you into the most bullheaded Cancer I’ve ever met, though you probably don’t know what that is.”

“I went to art school,” Steve said, that familiar petulant pout coming onto his face. “I know what the zodiac is.”

Tony grinned, carrying on undeterred. “You went for a year, right? You dropped out when you discovered Barnes was working at the docks alongside the grocer’s just to pay the fees. You’ll accept help, but you don’t take handouts. You moved in with Barnes when your ma died - tuberculosis - and he kicks in his sleep. You wake up with bruises and tell him it’s from the neighbour boys beating on you, which doesn’t exactly comfort him. You’ve lied on your enlistment forms at least five times already-”

Steve opened his mouth, and Tony held up a hand.

“-and you’re going to do it again, tonight. New Jersey, really? Even  _ I  _ don’t lower myself that much. Now, you’re smarter than anyone gives you credit for - including me, at the beginning - so you’re probably thinking someone could pick up this fun trivia by talking to Barnes when he’s had one too many drinks, which he does pretty often these days, right? So I’m gonna go deeper. Happy enough?”

An outward jut of his jaw and Steve’s arms crossing over his chest proved to Tony that he wasn’t backing down that easily. Good. Tony hadn’t predicted that he would. Indomitable will, and all that. 

Tony took another step forward, until he could almost smell the menthol cigarettes on Steve’s breath. Ah, the wonders of early American medicine -- treating asthma with its cause. “You’re clenching your fist, which means you either want to punch me or draw me. I would usually go for the latter, but we do have extenuating circumstances today … though I also saw the way you kept looking at me when we walked here. The same way you look at that guy a few streets east. Archie, right?”

Before Tony could quite register what was happening, he found his back against the wall, and Steve Rogers’ spindly arm pressed against his chest. 

“Good to know you’ve always been able to get the drop on me,” Tony mused, drily. It made sense that the guy who trained him in hand to hand would leave some details out that he considered to be common sense, though he had repeatedly mentioned paying attention to your surroundings. Tony had been paying very apt attention to Steve, not so much to Steve’s tendency to do something reckless when presented with an unknown variable. 

“What the hell is that thing in your chest?” Steve asked. 

“I told you,” Tony replied. “I’m from the-”

“I don’t care where you’re from. What is  _ that _ ?” Steve punctuated the word with a finger jabbed into his chest, just beside the reactor. On a good day - and this was one of those - the surrounding area was numb enough that Tony could be hit with a missile at point blank range and not feel a tickle. Of course, there would be the side effect of death in that scenario, but he was being metaphorical. 

“It’s my heart,” Tony said, and he dropped all humour from his tone, all pretence, all of his defences that he had so carefully constructed. Two years ago, this would’ve been impossible. The day Steve Rogers walked back into the workshop with apologies for how things had gone down in Berlin, and Tony realised he didn’t even need an apology to forgive him anyway, Tony made the other man a promise that when shit hit the fan, he’d break down the barriers, take down the walls, and let him in.  _ All  _ of him in. That included, apparently, his time displaced, alternate universe self. 

“It’s my heart,” Tony repeated, “and you’re very well acquainted with it.”

“In the future?”

“In the future.” 

There was something on his face that said that future wasn’t too far off. Tony supposed that wasn’t unexpected. How long had it taken for them to fall into a casual understanding after the Incident? It took Tony flying into a wormhole for Steve to realise he was wrong about the big man in a suit of armour, but maybe this Steve was different. Less stubborn, less world weary, less of a man out of time. Now, that epithet applied to Tony, but only for a night. 

“You feel something,” Tony said, raising his hand slowly, letting Steve’s gaze track every movement as he placed his hand over his on his chest. “It isn’t a sin.”

Steve’s focus lingered for a moment too long on their hands, and finally returned to meet Tony’s eyes. “You’re insane,” Steve reaffirmed.

“Probably,” Tony conceded, “but I need your help anyway.”

Steve dropped his hand from Tony’s chest, fingers flexing by his side like he’d been burned. “Where do we start?”

—

As it turned out, Tony Stark’s workshop in 2000 wasn’t much different from Tony Stark’s workshop in 2019, even when it was a microcosm tucked into the basement of a Swiss ski chalet. 

That being said, Steve still didn’t understand the half of what was going down in the space around him. Everywhere he looked, it seemed as if another aspect of modern technology was being overhauled and turned into something better, something novel. Tony always said that science was just one great mountain, each piece of the puzzle adding an extra rock before the generation that followed and so on, but Steve had never subscribed to that. Tony Stark was not a rock — he was a mountain in and of himself, a range if he was so inclined. His mind was vast, incomprehensible, and as long as Steve was alive he was never even going to be able to broach the surface of what he was capable of. 

Hell, that was why he loved him so damn much. 

“Wake up darlings, I’m home,” Tony announced, pulling off the red satin tie he’d been donning for the second time that night, draping it over an eager Dum-E who rolled up to greet his master. U clicked in Steve’s general direction, a little less enthusiastically than normal, but then again, this wasn’t the bot that Steve had spent an untold number of hours sketching and talking to while he waited for Tony to finish up on his latest project. 

Tony Stark, a billionaire sweating the small stuff, like flying his bots out to Switzerland so he could be greeted by them on his return home from the conference. He could claim all he wanted they boosted his efficacy — anyone who watched him work knew all Tony needed to change the world was his own company. 

_ “Good evening, sir,”  _ JARVIS’ voice came over the communication hub, much to Steve’s delight.  _ “I wasn’t expecting you home this evening. How was the conference?” _

“I know you’re just itching to ask about my guest, JARVIS,” Tony replied, shrugging off his suit jacket and throwing it towards U, who caught it with a practiced grace Dum-E never managed. “He’s a time traveller. You know, from the future.”

_ “He is Captain Rogers, sir.” _

“Of that I am entirely aware, buddy. Apparently we bump uglies sometime in the distant future.” Finally, Tony turned to look at Steve, if only to throw a wink over his shoulder from the other side of the workshop. 

Steve resisted the overwhelming urge to roll his eyes. This was not his Tony — this was a Tony that never promised to be his real self, who never learned  _ that  _ was the person Steve fell in love with in fits and starts, who still protected himself with a devil may care attitude and a questionable sense of humour. Steve wasn’t going to play into it like he had in New York. He had a job to do, and going toe to toe with a younger Tony wasn’t part of that. 

Compartmentalisation. Nat would be proud. 

“So you need a big, thick battery, is that it, Cap?” Tony’s voice rang against the metal of his unfinished creations. Steve settled himself carefully against one of the workbenches, hands clasped at parade rest on his belt. “Something to really get you turned up? Lighten your life? Keep you moving?”

“Tony.”

“No, I get it. You need something to dial you up to eleven, get your toes curling. Super-soldier endurance has to come with super-soldier stamina, right? Dad’s notes were pretty thorough, but of course he never got a front seat inspection-”

“ _ Tony,”  _ Steve repeated, and something in his voice this time made Tony shut the hell up and actually look at him. “I know this is a big shock for you, but-”

“A shock? Why would it be a shock? It’s just my childhood hero back from the dead, claiming to have come from the future, carrying extremely personal details about me in his back pocket, and the significant other in said future existence leaning up against the bench in my workshop as if he owns the place.”

Steve stood up straight. “I just want to get back.”  _ And then you’ll cease to exist, and this will be over. _

Right?

“Get back to  _ me,”  _ Tony confirmed. Steve felt his jaw tighten. “Look, you can’t expect me not to get stuck on this. I mean, you’re you, and I’m me, and we don’t exactly seem like we would … I mean, I can understand  _ me  _ wanting to take anything you were willing to give, but it’s the other half of the equation I can’t quite quantify.”

“That-”  _ Is because you don’t know you yet.  _ At least, that was what Steve was planning on saying, before Tony continued on his tangent. He did this sometimes. Steve rested back against the workbench, knowing he would be here for some time before Tony wore himself out.

“And that’s just considering the part of this that I can understand intellectually speaking. I mean, the complications of my personal relationships aside, there is the fact that I managed to logically, systematically develop some kind of system that allows a person to travel between two fixed points in time. Not only that, but I didn’t warn you against talking to me, which means the butterfly effect must be negated. Is it? It has to be. You’re Captain America. You might bend rules, but you don’t flip off the universe.”

Steve gave a wry smirk. “You would be surprised,” he muttered.

“Do you get to leave me the plans? Can I use the information I already know to make tomorrow better than today, or does that change everything happening from this point in? Is that the purpose of you coming here? Is that your plan? You haven’t mentioned what you want to do here besides get back to where you came from, which brings into question what you were intending to do in the first place besides royally fuck with the space-time continuum. Is the future that bad? No, it can’t be. It won’t be, right?”

Nat shooting spitballs out of the end of paper straws across the dining table. Bruce’s glasses slipping down his nose as he excitedly demonstrated his latest prospect. Clint firing an arrow with devastating accuracy using only his feet and determination. Tony humming under his breath in the morning, when six months ago Steve was lucky to get his boyfriend to sleep before four. 

“Nah,” Steve replied. “The future isn’t that bad.”

Tony’s shoulders sagged with a relieved breath, and Steve felt warmth spread through him at the fact that he could still bring comfort, even the smallest amount, without knowing the man at all. 

“Did old me give you any tips on prospective power sources?” Tony asked. “I’d hate to give you something that left you stranded in 2012. The world is supposed to end then, you know.”

“Is it?” Steve asked, as if he hadn’t read a hundred and one articles after the Chitauri attack stating that the Mayan calendars had been perfectly accurate, how the Avengers had defied even fate itself. He didn’t particularly like those articles. The universe had a way of righting itself, after all, and claiming to have bested a higher power only seemed like waving a flag towards bigger threats. Tony did it anyway. Steve was more cautious, usually. 

“I’m guessing it doesn’t,” Tony mused.

“No,” Steve said. “It doesn’t.”

“Pity,” Tony muttered. “I’d prefer to die before I get old.”

“It’s not that bad. You suit grey.”

For a reason he couldn’t quite explain, the slight uptick of one side of Tony’s mouth made the back of Steve’s neck heat up with more intensity than all the wide, dramatised smirks put together. 

“You’re really into me, aren’t you?” Tony asked, and then there was his reason — Tony was in  _ awe _ . 

Still, Steve didn’t feel entirely comfortable discussing his in-depth feelings with anyone besides Tony, even  _ another  _ Tony. It felt disloyal, creeping around under his skin. “You mentioned repulsor tech,” he said, because he knew at this point the arc reactor was out of the question, unless they made their way to the Malibu branch of Stark Industries, which would take far too long. 

“Ah,” Tony said, going over to one of the crates, rooting around for a minute before pulling out a missile casing. The blood in Steve’s veins went cold, but he kept his face impassive. “Palladium, that’s what he wants, right?”

“You would know best,” Steve said. “You’re the engineer.”

“Palladium.” Tony dropped the missile, clearly unarmed, onto the workbench and pulled a stool over to begin work on it. “Two hours, max,” he said, answering a question Steve hadn’t asked out loud. 

“Great,” Steve replied, settling in for a wait. A beat passed, and when Tony reached for a soldering iron, Steve spoke again. “Thank you, by the way,” he said. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“Of course I did,” Tony said. He dropped his visor, though not quickly enough to cover the grin that came onto his face. “I’d be super pissed at me if my past self kept my boyfriend for himself, and that’s a level of cosmic karma I don’t need in my life.”

—

Bucky came back home and Tony immediately assumed the plan would go to hell in a handbasket, but Steve just told him the truth - that Tony had helped him with a fight and got injured, requiring his ma’s medical kit - and Bucky accepted it without question. 

Movies made time travel seem a lot harder than it actually was. Tony wasn’t sure whether he was pleased by how smoothly it was going, or a little disappointed. Chaos was the spice of life, after all.

It even proved easy getting into the Stark Expo without a ticket. Bucky said to the guy at the gates that his buddy bought one but they worked down on the docks and it slipped right out of his shoe and went into the Hudson, and the ticketmaster believed him without pushing any further than a casual glance over Tony’s (completely innocent) face. 

“You were right,” Tony muttered to Steve as they walked into the Expo, receiving a raised eyebrow in response. “People were more trusting back then. Or back  _ now _ . Whatever.”

“There’s a war on our shores,” Steve replied. “People have bigger things to worry about than whether you’re faking to get into a science fair.”

Again, Steve Rogers coming in with the extremely valid points. Tony hated when he did that. He  _ also  _ hated that Steve had an uncanny ability to put things into perspective, and by hated it, he meant he didn’t hate it at all. 

He was going to have to tell his Steve he loved him when he got back, wasn’t he? Damn. The four letter word always gave him hives, despite how much he meant it. 

“The girls will be showing up soon,” Bucky informed Steve, who looked like he would prefer the ground to open up and swallow him whole. “Sorry I couldn’t get you a date. Short notice.”

It took a beat for Tony to realise Barnes was talking to him. Even years after Siberia, they had never quite managed to hit casual conversation without the precipitating factor of battle or training loosening them up. Of course, Barnes didn’t actually manage casual with  _ anyone _ besides Steve, Sam and Sharon, occasionally Nat. Tony stopped taking it personally long ago.

“It’s alright,” Tony said with a shrug. “I’m taken.”

Bucky’s gaze went to Tony’s left hand, then back up to his face. “Going steady?” Bucky asked.

“With a few hills thrown in,” Tony replied, “but we’re drawing a roadmap as we go.”

“I gotta whiz,” Steve said, and Tony blinked a few times in his direction before he realised why Steve was looking at him so significantly.

“Oh,” Tony said, master of deception. “Yes, me too.”

Barnes, who Tony knew from future conversations had more than a couple of encounters in the men’s bathroom in the years before the war, looked between them with renewed interest. He opened his mouth to speak, and Tony grabbed Steve’s sleeve, pulling him in the direction of the bathrooms.

“Hey,” Steve said once they were out of the danger zone, swatting Tony’s hand off his jacket sleeve. “I don’t manhandle you.”

“Not yet,” Tony replied without missing a beat, to which Steve went a rather impressive shade of red. “Forties sensibility, got it.”

“It’s not that,” Steve said, even though Tony knew from in depth conversations in bed at four in the morning it was at least  _ part  _ of it. “It’s … I don’t even  _ know  _ you.”

“It’s flirting, not getting down on one knee,” Tony replied, which had the opposite effect to what he was intending. Steve was now turning purple. Just the tips of his ears, though, so Tony knew he hadn’t completely crossed the line. “Joking. I’m joking with you.”

“Is that how it started? With us?”

Now it was Tony’s turn to stare at Steve as if he had two heads. 

“So I know what to look for,” Steve explained, ever the tactician. 

Tony opened his mouth, and that was when he heard an all too familiar voice boom over the microphone speakers. Christ, the interference was  _ grating.  _

_ “Hello and welcome to … the  _ future!  _ My name is Howard Stark, and oh boy, do we have some wonders for you lovely ladies and gents to look at tonight.” _

“That’s Dad,” Tony said.

Steve looked rather unimpressed. “You’ve mentioned that.”

“We need to get to Dad.”

“ _ You  _ need to get to him.”

“What happened to one for all, all for one?”

“What happened to listening to me before you start jabbering?” Steve asked. This time, he turned Tony around with a firm hand to his shoulder, pointing to the side of the stage. “I’ll distract security, you go through to backstage.”

“What about the showgirls?” 

“You’re Howard Stark’s son,” Steve replied, and Tony had to admit, yet again, he had a point.

“How are you going to deal with security?”

“Easy,” Steve said. “Punch me.”

Tony was taking a step back before the words even left Steve’s mouth. “No.”

“Come on. You need to get home, there’s a ten minute window before he gets back on stage, and then he’s there all night. This is the quickest way.”

“I’m not hurting you, Steve.”

Steve’s hands were on his arms, then, holding him so he could look in his eyes, as if Tony ever looked anywhere else. “Are you telling me that in the entire course of knowing each other, you’ve never wanted to deck me?”

“Oh, all the time,” Tony said, and there was a little wave of satisfaction at his concedence registering on Steve’s face as shock. “I even dreamed about it, pretty regularly in fact. Still do, sometimes. You’re an extremely infuriating person, Rogers. The tragedy of it, though, is that I’m seriously, desperately in love with you, so punching you in the face? No can do.”

Steve gaped, just a little, and then in one swift movement that Tony would’ve predicted with graceful, powerful Captain America but considered impossible with this version of Steve Rogers, he turned himself towards the brick wall beside them and smashed his nose off it.

Tony’s mouth dropped open. “I, uh … not the reaction I was going for, but-”

“This’ll work,” Steve said, actually going so far as to squeeze his nose so it bled  _ more,  _ red spots forming on his shirt. “See you in seventy years?”

And there was that grin, bloodstained and beautiful, that always had Tony recalibrate even mid-mission, hell mid- _ flight.  _

“I’m gonna kiss you so hard when I get back,” Tony promised. 

Steve just kept that grin, albeit with red prickling the back of his neck, and turned to make his way toward the security guards. Tony was glad for the brief pause it allowed him to gather himself, and when Steve stumbled into the guards, hands covered with blood and pointing to a vague place in the crowd, Tony slipped in behind them.

He knew his father in the kind of way  _ everyone  _ knew Howard Stark — vaguely from the headlines, and therefore not at all. That being said, Tony had picked up some insider knowledge from living in the Stark mansion since the day and hour he was born. The largest dressing room, the one that would make the most sense to put the dancers in so they could space out, would invariably be occupied by the man with the largest ego in the state instead. 

Tony looked around, was thrilled to find that CCTV didn’t exist in the forties (he knew that, of course, but instinct took over when he was in mission mode) and slipped into the dressing room. 

“Marlene, I told you, we need to wait until after-”

Howard Stark was cut off mid sentence because his darling son used his very valuable energy to mobilise the armour over his fist, and punch him right in the nose. 

“Sorry Dad,” Tony muttered, dragging his father over to prop him against the wall. He even gave him a cushion for behind his concussed head. Never let it be said Tony Stark was not a bleeding heart when it counted. “I need to steal your inventions — and you kinda deserved that.”

Howard was twenty-six years old in 1943, but paranoia was not something that came with old age. His determination to keep patents and designs out of enemy hands were more to do with the fact that he was terrified of someone improving upon his epiphanies, but that was beside the point. It worked for Tony in this instance, and so he made his way towards the shoe closet. The second he opened the door, he was greeted with a faint blue glow. 

Repulsor technology, based on anti-gravitic mechanisms for the flying car that Howard tried (and failed) to present at this very Expo. 

“Bingo,” Tony muttered, grateful that he had listened to his father’s bitter tirades against this particular piece of technology, and even more grateful that he managed to make it into something monumentally more useful himself. What better way to flex on your father than to succeed where he (repeatedly) failed? 

Tony plucked one of the batteries from the shoe box, slotting it into his transporter. The interface loaded up and then turned green, indicating systems were go, and he wasn’t likely to get anatomically spliced on the way back. Of course, there was always a risk, so Tony made his way back over to his father, kneeling beside him. 

“I love you,” Tony said, hand hovering over the button, “but you are one real son of a bitch.”

The world went white. 

_ — _

They don’t talk much, or at all, in fact. The two hours pass by in somewhat companionable silence. It’s not awkward, far from it. Steve is reminded of the early days of the Avengers, right back to the first day. Tony flew that missile into the wormhole, and Steve realised everything Fury had included in that file had only shown one side of the great Tony Stark. The other side, the best side, that was the heart that glowed bright even as he was lying in the middle of the pavement, that heart-stopping moment when Steve was convinced he was dead before he even got a chance to apologise.

Not that he had much time to put sorry into words when Tony came back around, of course. they were immediately whisked into the final stand against Loki, then hours upon hours of debriefing, and then Tony had surprised him. Pierce and Fury had left the room, and Tony flicked a piece of paper at Steve’s head that read simply  _ should we get out of here? Tick yes or no.  _

That was the note that changed everything. Steve still had it, tucked carefully into one of his notebooks from when he came out of the ice. He ticked yes, after only a second of hesitation, and Tony had flown him out the window to the museum and showed him what he fought for, what he  _ died  _ for. Captain America was celebrated all around him, but Steve was far more interested in the man sitting an inch too close to him on the bench. 

He learned a lot of things about Tony that day. He learned that if there was a napkin in the middle of the table, they would both reach for it at the same time — Steve to sketch out the curves of Tony’s jawline, Tony to get some uniform ideas down on paper while the inspiration struck. He learned that Tony was obsessed with legacy, with tomorrow, even if he spent more time than he liked to admit in the past. He learned that the war turned Howard cold. He learned that Tony could be funny without being offensive or unkind, that he could be smart without being condescending, that he could be generous without even needing to think about it. 

They bonded that day, but no one had been able to tell for months afterwards. Careful not to disturb the newly found truce, desperate to find some degree of comfort, Steve and Tony instead settled for somewhat silent companionship, at least on Steve’s end. He sat down in the workshop, flicking through case files and battle strategies while Tony worked. Tony pretended that the thwack of a punch while Steve sparred or worked out was entirely conducive to his creative process. Slowly, Tony started talking more. Ranting, raving, going on impassioned tirades about futurism and the importance of a good java bean and how it was a tragedy that Steve hadn’t heard of Sinatra yet. 

Then, the texting. The phone calls. The emails and excuses to come around, plans they needed each other’s input in. Soon, even the other Avengers could see what was happening. Steve and Tony were becoming each other’s best friends, confidantes,  _ partners.  _

Steve could see it all happening again right in front of him, and he would be nostalgic for that period of his life if he wasn’t completely consumed with wanting to get back to the  _ present.  _ For all the butterflies in his stomach and the wild excuses he came up with not to fall in love, Steve still preferred seeing Tony with bedhead, or flipping him off when he flirted smoothly enough to make Steve go purple in the middle of a tactical meeting.

“It’s done,” Tony said, the buzz from the champagne gone and replaced with a tiredness that smoothed out his edges, leaving him frayed and open. “Repulsor battery, locked and loaded. This puppy has enough juice to take you to the year 3000, if you wanted.”

Steve walked over, looking down at the glowing core on the table. Leave it up to Tony to make something beautiful, even under pressure. “Thank you, Tony,” Steve said, and he reached out to pat Tony on the back. He could feel the rumble of a laugh through his shoulder blades.

“God, what a day,” Tony muttered. “If I wake up tomorrow on my bathroom floor and find out this was a bad trip, I’m going to be really pissed off.”

“You won’t, I promise you,” Steve said. This Tony wouldn’t even wake up at all. The second Steve bounced from the pocket universe, it would cease to exist. He was standing in the mist of history, and he knew he couldn’t be paid to go back. 

He slotted the battery into the transporter, waiting until it charged up with a smiley face on the display before he met Tony’s eyes once more. 

“It’s been nice seeing you, Cap,” Tony said, breaking the silence first in the way that he was wont to do. “I’m looking forward to it, you know.”

Knowing exactly what he was going to say, but also knowing that undercutting Tony’s proclamations would get him nothing but sulking, Steve smiled and asked, “Looking forward to what, Tony?”

Tony grinned, just as Steve’s hand hovered over the transporter. “Deserving you,” Tony said.

“I could say the same thing,” Steve replied, and then he was surrounded by white.

_ — _

They both woke up with their faces in the dirt, a few inches from each other at most, Origin’s incessant, villainous cackling ringing in their ears. 

“You will all bow before me!” he bellowed. “For I, the Origin, have bested your leaders and-”

Steve got to his feet first, which meant a tag team was entirely possible, with Steve punching Origin right in his hooked nose just as Tony formed the gauntlet and dug him right in the crown jewels. He went down like a bag of lead, and that was when the rest of the Avengers started coming into focus.

“About time you decided to show up again, boys,” Nat said, in that smokey voice of hers that always got thicker when she was trying not to show affection. Her hair was slick with sweat, sticking to the sharp curve of her cheek, and she was holding what appeared to be half of a lamppost in her hands. Tony was vaguely offended at her forgoing the bo-staff he had spent the better part of three days on, and then he spotted Sam clasping it, knuckles white, the end of the staff speared into a gloop mole.

PETA was going to have a field day with this. 

“Steve!” Bucky called out, navigating through the rubble, slinging his gun around to his back as he ran towards his friend, arms outstretched. “You gotta stop going through holes in the universe, buddy,” he muttered, as Steve pulled him in close, his voice muffled somewhat by the shoulder pads of Steve’s uniform. “Scares me shitless every time.”

“I think he cares about you,” Sharon chimed in with a smirk, but she had exactly the same reaction when she spotted Tony. “Hey cuz,” she said, going for a punch on the arm before Tony grabbed her into a squeeze tight enough that the breath left her chest for a rather spectacular moment. 

“This is nice and all,” Sam commented, “but I think we should pack this guy up for the Raft. My back’s starting to give out.”

“That’s what you get for going Wakandan on the wings,” Tony singsonged back.

“You’re right. They’re just too fantastic for my fragile human form to sustain,” Sam deadpanned, not buying Tony’s shit for a minute. “Good to have you back, man. Steve would’ve been a real downer if you got chopped in half on the way back.”

With that sentiment, Bucky and Sharon let go of their respective anxiety inducing family members. Bucky slung his arm around Sharon instead, her hand going instinctively to entwine with his as they walked across the battered ground. Nat and Sam moved in, wrapping Origin’s arms around their shoulders, and began to walk him towards the SHIELD rover that had just pulled up. 

A flash of newly blonde hair appeared from the side of the vehicle. “Hey assholes,” Director Daisy Johnson of the Strategic She Doesn’t Need To Remember The Acronym Because She Owns This Shit called out. “I thought we said no more battling bad guys when Bake Off’s on! I’m missing Paul tearing this guy a new one over his pastry.”

“There’s always catch up,” Sharon replied, rather diplomatically. Director Johnson let out a huff of a sigh, retreating back into her vehicle, no doubt to lament on the fact that a life of superheroics had led to the reward of having to deal with yet  _ more  _ superheroics. 

Finally, with the Avengers aching, SHIELD agents fanning out to collect the last of the rather bewildered super-villains and grab Origin from Black Widow and Falcon, Steve and Tony turned to look at each other. 

Tony spoke first, as was characteristic. “You made out with me, didn’t you?” he asked. Steve looked up to the sky, hoping for some divine intervention, only to see a strip of gold on the corner of his eyebrow. It must’ve been there since Bern. “I’m just saying, I was pretty hot in my thirties. If I got the chance to go back and do myself, I totally would. In fact, that’s always been something of a dream of mine-”

“I did not make out with the other you, Tony,” Steve, long suffering and long in love, replied. “Why would I?” Tony did not speak for a long moment, as was decidedly uncharacteristic. “Did  _ you  _ make out with me?”

“No!” Tony replied, as if he was utterly offended at the mere notion of Steve even suggesting it. Steve, against his better judgement and probably because the utter strangeness of the day was beginning to wear on him, felt his shoulder slouch. “Not that I  _ wouldn’t,  _ by the way,” Tony interjected. 

“I wasn’t me back then,” Steve said with a shrug, gesturing to his general, aching, personage. “I wouldn’t blame you for-”

“Steve,” Tony interrupted, and for a brief moment Steve was sure his boyfriend was going to shut him up with a kiss which, while nice, wasn’t particularly appreciated given the topic of their conversation. Instead, Tony brushed his thumb against Steve’s eyebrow, flicking the gold strand into the rubble. “The last image I have is you bashing your nose against a brick wall to make a point, and then charging right up to security guards just to give a complete stranger an opening to get in and beat up Howard Stark.”

Everything in that sentence  _ should’ve  _ been enough to give Steve pause, but he was a man that lived with demigods and superheroes on a daily basis. Nothing was strange anymore, and with what he knew of himself, and the man in front of him, nothing was particularly surprising, either. 

“That happened immediately after I said I was desperately in love with you, too, so talk about giving a guy a hang up.”

Now  _ that  _ \-- that felt more impossible than a giant metal deathbot ripping a city from the Earth’s surface and an alien army charging from space put together. Steve felt hot all over, and he could tell by the look on Tony’s face that the other man was more than willing for the ground to open up and swallow him whole, though he wouldn’t allow his face to show it. 

“Because I do,” Tony said, dropping his hands down to his sides. “Love you.”

Steve stepped towards him, pulling off one of his gloves as he went. He lifted his hand to touch against Tony’s face, thumb tracing the curve of his lower lip. Tony took a small, shuddering breath, almost going on tiptoes to push into the sensation, and that was when Steve kissed him. 

They’d shared a lot of kisses in the past six months. Steve used to think there could be no difference between them, but then he got some experience under his belt. His final kiss with Peggy had been a goodbye. The one he shared with Sharon when she brought them their gear, that had been gratitude. His first one with Tony had been impulsive, desire spilling out over itself, and then a different one ever since. 

Steve had never kissed the same person twice before, but he’d kissed Tony Stark a thousand times over.  _ Good morning  _ kisses and  _ I made waffles  _ kisses.  _ I love your hair like that  _ kisses and  _ you’re great with your hands  _ kisses. Kisses before they went on missions, kisses when they came home, lips pressed to each other’s foreheads when they walked past with hot coffee mugs in their hands. Quick kisses in between meetings, half hearted ones when Tony was absorbed with his latest project, firm and insistent presses of their mouths together when Steve needed something,  _ anything,  _ just to feel like the body he was in was his own. 

This one? It was all of the above and more. It was like coming  _ home,  _ as cheesy as that sounded, and Steve was pretty sure Tony would’ve said just that - he was always more romantic than he let on - if Steve hadn’t broken the silence first. 

“Love you too, stupid,” Steve said, as clear as crystal, and Tony broke into that bright white grin and dragged Steve down by the collar of his uniform to kiss him again, messier this time, their teeth almost clacking together, but  _ perfect.  _

“I don’t care, you know,” Tony muttered when they finally pulled back for air. Steve could’ve gone longer, but Tony was still entirely human, something that the other man found intensely regrettable and Steve found only added to his appeal. “Big body, little body, no body at all. I want  _ you,  _ not Erskine’s serum. The only thing I want to thank him for is making it so you were even  _ more  _ you than you were before.”

If if was anyone else saying it, Steve might brush it off. He was under no illusion that how he looked now, how he acted, what he was capable of, was entirely preferable. But then Tony looked up at him with those big, brown, unguarded eyes and yeah, he melted. He always had, probably always would. 

“You flirted a lot,” Steve said in return, because anything else was dangerously close to sentiment for anywhere outside of the four walls they’d constructed for themselves. “I couldn’t get your eyes off me.”

“Can you blame me?” Tony asked, eyes shining. “God, I bet I was  _ seething  _ with envy. That’s a good feeling, you know, being jealous of your future self. It makes the whole  _ today into tomorrow  _ shtick really sell itself.”

Steve just smiled, hand moving down to meet Tony’s, who immediately retracted the gauntlet to facilitate their fingers sliding together. “I could draw your face when I told you, if you wanted to see.”

Tony leaned up once more, pressing a kiss to the curve of Steve’s lips. “Soulmate,” he declared. 

“Yeah,” Steve said as they walked, bumping lightly into each other’s sides with every step. “Soulmate.”


End file.
